


Every story tells a thousand stories – editorial

by Charles_Rockafellor



Category: Original Work
Genre: Philosophy, Recursion, facets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24383305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/pseuds/Charles_Rockafellor
Summary: Where do stories come from?  Where do they go?  What lies beneath the story being told, both within the world of the story and within the mind of the teller?𝑫𝒐𝒏'𝒕 𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒆𝒕 𝒕𝒐 𝑳𝒊𝒌𝒆, 𝑺𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒆, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑺𝒖𝒃𝒔𝒄𝒓𝒊𝒃𝒆! ❤️
Collections: Worldbuilding Meta





	Every story tells a thousand stories – editorial

So: what is a story, anyway?

There's the story that you read or have told to you, the actual sequence of words chosen by the author or storyteller.

There's the picture and sound reel in your head.

There's the story that the teller seeks to convey with nuances and so forth, the one that they're never quite certain comes across as intended.

There's the allegory, intended or not, that carries itself forth through the reader's filters.

There's the story that it tells of the world that the teller lives in, the zeitgeist and undertones of their own perceptions.

There's the story that the teller's subconscious mind wends its way toward. Some of this no doubt manifests itself at times, perhaps unknown if the teller's less introspective, perhaps imagined if the teller stares into their own abyss too much.

Is there a self-aware story, like a meme, a sort of conceptual virus, that seeks (after a fashion) to see itself told, when in the wee hours the tired teller puts pen to paper incoherently, letting stream of consciousness dictate a tortured trail of unreasoned babble? One wonders...

Perhaps there's a PSH notification that prises open the teller's thoughts, inserting elements and even tales whole cloth into their works – maybe an overly insistent muse, or the voice of God, or aliens and their overly complicated B-grade evil plans?

Then there's nascent within it every story that isn't being told with that particular telling, like the echoes of the departed and the imagined generations yet to come; those not with us are yet there at a tea ceremony.

Between this last and a given tale in its telling is the question of fine or gross differences – is a river once crossed the same river if it were later identical in every particle and vector? Is the semantic content and impact of a word truly the same from one language to another, or between generations or dialects or regions?

In the world setting of the story itself there is also the world around the principals, implicitly much larger than the painted backdrop on a stage. How many stories must such worlds necessarily contain themselves, if they are to be taken as a living civilization? Are those stories somehow not integrally part of the story itself?

**O ~~~ O**


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